The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  What humbling, remarkable days these were, being passed from stranger to welcoming stranger through the Ostrobothnian wilderness, suckling deep on the refrigerated milk of human kindness at every stage. And never once footing the bill: my various hosts shunned every offer of payment with such vigour that I always paused before wedging a twenty-euro note under the kettle as I left, wary of causing offence. They didn’t even like me thanking them. For some time I wondered what on earth Raija must have said to unleash such weapons-grade hospitality: that I was the easily displeased vanguard of a mighty legion of shopping cyclists whose custom would bring great prosperity to their struggling settlements, or an escaped Ostrobothnian freedom fighter, or the wolverine’s ruthless nemesis. My last landlady’s explanation had offered a more accurate insight, and Raija later gave me her full take on it: ‘When you live in a difficult region and find a bad situation, you must depend 100 per cent on other people. They didn’t want to help you, they needed to. Now they feel happy and more safe, because they can believe that someone will be there to help them when they need it.’

  One good turn and all that. Arctic karma. As much as it troubled me to know that I would never be there to reciprocate when these wonderful people needed help, the way Raija told it I basically did them all a massive favour. Don’t mention it.

  March was over, and though the conditions didn’t exactly scream April, Finland had begun to shed its winter coat. Streaks of bare tarmac appeared, along with the odd patch of brown soil and zebra-stripe of liquid lake. I took off one of my four hats and the middle pair of gloves. For the first time I began to examine the map over breakfast with something close to anticipation rather than neat dread; I’d crossed the Arctic Circle and the miles were getting easier by the day. A shopkeeper asked if I was heading south or north, a choice that hadn’t sensibly existed hitherto. No longer did I stab listlessly at the camera wondering if this would be the last picture I’d ever take, and imagine it being projected on to a courtroom wall so that the coroner and my loved ones could deduce what I’d been trying to tell them with a close-up of a snow-sculpted cock and balls.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Sadly I forgot my trunks.

  But progress, as I somehow felt it might, came at a price. I was fairly caning it along some evergreen corridor, head down and knees out in hot pursuit of the magic 1,000km mark, when the left-hand pedal began to miss a beat at the top of each revolution. This soon swelled into a quarter-turn missing link, and, very shortly after it did, the whole crank fell off and hit the road with a slushy chink. I propped the bike on its stand, retrieved the crank and frowned at the square hole at its non-pedal business end. It was much less square than it should have been. Than it had been when Pub Quiz Peter and I threaded it on to the bottom-bracket spindle thing. I pictured this moment and saw the two of us chortling at the handwritten instructions enclosed by the German vendor, a man who signed himself Thomas. ‘You must mount this crankset with 35–40Nm. I Wish You Success.’ Ha ha! 35–40 what-nows? Wish away, German Thomas! And so I reached the very shallow bottom of this mechanical mystery.

  In these numbing conditions, every alfresco spanner session was a fumbled, sometimes tearful frustration, like trying to make an Airfix kit in boxing gloves. I reattached the crank as best I could, which meant it fell off again half a mile up the road. An hour later I pushed my stricken MIFA up the snowy approach to a farmhouse with a smoking chimney. I had often wondered how on earth a Finnish farmer occupied himself in winter, those long months with nothing to do but sit by the stove in his socks adding vowels to stuff. The door opened and I shortly found out: he sits by the stove in his socks with a gigantic tool kit in his lap, awaiting the knock of a distressed cyclist. If you need help, you will ask.

  How splendidly capable these backwoods Finns were, I thought, pedalling smoothly away from the farmstead ten minutes later. Perhaps it was just natural selection in an unforgiving environment that didn’t suffer fools gladly: all the hopeless idiots had long since frozen to death or been eaten. I had already come to a related conclusion in regards to the astonishing proficiency of Finland’s surviving drivers, who would shoot slickly past at intemperate speed on surfaces you could barely stand up on. My nightly chapters of The Winter War had outlined the Finnish male’s multi-competent tenacity, and now I was having it coloured in before my eyes. And in the very finest detail, because in the hours ahead the crank repeatedly worked itself loose anew, requiring the attention of two further farmers, both bearing an air of silent focus and a hefty metal box full of hard-core man stuff. Their task was not made easier by my own remedial efforts when the crank fell off between farms. Have you ever played Rock, Log, Bike? The rules are pretty simple: rock beats bike, log smacks bike.

  The snow was coming down again by the time I pushed the MIFA into a hibernating holiday village beside a frozen lake. Raija had worked her magic once more, persuading the elderly owners to open up a chalet for me, and advising the husband of my ongoing mechanical plight. I hoisted the bike onto my chalet’s bleak veranda and he went to work, at length separating the essential components. He held the crank up to the porch light and together we stared at a very round hole that could never again be home to a very square peg. He nodded gravely, then said: ‘Smoke sauna, seven o’clock.’

  My eyes were still red when I woke up the next morning. And only partly on account of the smoke sauna, a rasping, soot-lined dragon’s lung from which I had staggered forth mired in smutted body fluids. An hour later, with my laundry strung up and a belly full of broken biscuits, I had opted to unwind before bed with a fireside Dirty Rudolf: the meaty old wood burner was laid with logs and ready to go. It was a decision that once acted upon very promptly filled my pine chalet with choking billows and aggressive electronic beeping. When the old man barged in through the front door I knew our bluff friendship was over. For one thing I had disgraced myself, indeed brought the entire male gender into disrepute, by unaccountably failing to notice the hefty chimney-blocking iron paddle that he now yanked free from its slot in the flue. For another I was still struggling into a wet pair of pants.

  With a bill to settle and a broken bike, sneaking away at dawn was regrettably not an option. Instead, I now walked to his garage whiffing of shame and cinders, fairly certain that the boiler-suited man standing with him outside it had come to help thrash some common sense into me. Once again I had underestimated the kindness of Finnish strangers, and, I strongly suspect, Raija’s ability to wring it out from afar. Harri was an amateur mechanic with strong arms and a patient eye, who married crank to bracket with forty minutes of careful filing and reckless brute force. ‘Is OK now for some few kilometre,’ he said, lighting a celebratory cigarette. He took a long drag, then allowed the tiniest flicker of amusement to pass across his oily features. ‘You are maybe too hot with trousers?’

  It was 50km to the next town, on a road Harri assured me lay impassably smothered in overnight snow. A bike fixer does not a weatherman make: I made it to Kuhmo in under five hours, and walked into its solitary hotel no more than lightly buttered in slush. My room was a microcosm of Finnish towns in general, and this one in particular: clean, bland and cheerless. I would be savouring these attributes. I don’t make a habit of weeping on the phone to anyone who isn’t a vet, but of late my calls home had been routinely blighted by blubbering self-pity and other unedifying expressions of the loneliness of the long-distance shopping cyclist. My wife might forgivably have barked at me to snap out of it. Instead, she and my son were coming out to Kuhmo to keep me company for a few days, bringing along nappies, my favourite blanket and some new life-insurance documents that apparently needed an urgent signature. An enforced day of rest preceded my support crew’s arrival, and I would largely spend it watching a bulldozed mound of skanky, late-season snow retreat very slowly across the hotel car park, and being glad I didn’t call Kuhmo home.

  ‘I saw your bicycle. It is not what I expected.’

  The hotel rec
eptionist’s morning greeting was a variation on the English phrase I most regularly heard in Finland, stripped of the usual reference to my MIFA’s modest dimensions. I hated not being able to reciprocate, to coax out even a single intelligible word in the native tongue. But what a twisted tongue it was. As he waved his hand over a map full of blue numbers and tumbling white asterisks, the TV weatherman always sounded like some kid messing about in a language he’d just made up. Even words that generally had some common cross-border ground in most European dictionaries – things like days of the week and months of the year – were over the hills and far away in Finnish. April: huhtikuu. Friday: perjantai. I abandoned all hope of getting even the loosest grip on the language when the German owner of the Tankavaara gold-mining theme resort (that’s right) told me that Finns decline their nouns in twenty very different ways, and have a single word that means ‘I wonder if I should run around aimlessly’. (Much as juoksentelisinkohan sounded like the desperate product of an especially long Finnish winter, it also seemed like a thought I would inevitably wish to articulate in some endless forest or other, so I had him write it down for me on one of his business cards, along with the words for ‘thank you’ and ‘bicycle’.)

  After breakfast I went to a supermarket over the road to nose about the wrinkled fresh produce, then enjoyed a quick tour of Kuhmo’s wide-set, four-square civic and commercial structures. It seemed awfully quiet for what I had just realised was the Easter holiday weekend. I found out where everyone was a few hours later, while treating the MIFA to a 1,000km service in a shrinking square of low-voltage sun outside my hotel’s slabbed façade. A steady stream of locals old and young passed by as I oiled and tweaked, heading into the hotel’s basement bar. In dribs and drabs they periodically emerged, blinking and much less steady, to mill glassily about and smoke. A leather-coated man of about thirty came and sat down on the steps next to me, lit up at the sixth attempt and then toppled slowly over onto his side. He enjoyed the balance of his cigarette in this position, and was crawling back to the door by feel when I went back indoors to read. I looked at my watch: 2.17 p.m.

  I still had eight hours to kill, and shot a few in the face immersed in the tale of the White Death. The Winter War sniper awarded this sobriquet was a 5ft 3in outdoorsman by the name of Simo Häyhä, who without any military training single-handedly accounted for 542 Russians in a hundred short and sunless days. Häyhä was a handy shot – most of his victims were gunned down at a range of 400 yards or more – but an absolute maestro of stealth. He used simple iron sights on his rifle to avoid the tell-tale reflections of telescopic glass, teamed his white cape with an eerie white mask, and spent hours tied high in trees or crouched behind drifts, stuffing snow in his mouth to avoid betraying himself with steamy exhalations.

  The Red Army were so spooked by Häyhä that he became the regular target of bespoke artillery strikes. In the last week of the war, a Russian marksman finally got him in the jaw with an explosive bullet; with half his face blown off, Häyhä calmly picked up his rifle, steadied himself, and shot the Russian dead. After a slow and difficult recovery, the White Death lived on to the age of ninety-six, frustrating breathless interviewers to the end with the sheer force of his Finnishness. Those who made a pilgrimage to visit the deadliest sniper in history could expect the same one-word answer to all queries about the origin and honing of his skills, and their lethal application: juoksentelisinkohan. (Actually it was ‘practice’.)

  My support crew arrived late, but I was so delighted to see them I didn’t mind, not even when they greeted me in the car park with a stream of woe about tackling Finland in an underpowered rental vehicle. That morning I had spent some time in front of the mirror, trying to see myself through the eyes of long-absent loved ones. This was time well spent, as it prepared me for the concern and mild revulsion that annexed their expressions when we went inside and they beheld me in the light. The blistered, ruddy face with its flash-fried, snow-burned balaclava slot. Clothes hanging loose on a shrunken torso. Fingers so feebly arthritic I couldn’t close them around the handle of my wife’s suitcase. And coiling forth from my once-tight trousers, now held up with a luggage-strap belt, a nose-wrinkling odour that I no longer even noticed: from force of habit, I had that morning unnecessarily smeared my loins in Savlon.

  5. CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN FINLAND

  With the sun out and my panniers in the support vehicle, I rode on through a different Finland, a world of carefree speed and achievement. The slush was in full retreat from the road, running down the gutters in gritty brown rivers, and shrinking into damp Rorschach blots on the surface. After two weeks of under-wheel creak and crunch, my ears attuned to the novel thrum of spiked tyre on tarmac. Lorries delivered my first facefuls of dust. Dabs of life and colour enlivened winter’s dead palette: a tentative leaf bud, a blue bottle, the occasional big red barn, Scandinavia’s architectural gift to the Midwest. In fact, I was now routinely reminded of rural America: the big-country emptiness, the shabby farmsteads strewn with rusted pick-ups, the steel guitar twangs that leaked out of most passing vehicles. Even the bleak and sleepy towns, now that I thought of it, had a Fargo feel to them.

  Off the road, admittedly, Finland wasn’t very different at all: it was still well below zero in the shade, and the countryside lay under a thick white blanket. But at least there were people out in it now, getting their Nordic skis out for one last time before spring, or despoiling the restive calm with harsh and buzzy snowmobiles. At least once a day I would pass an old guy in an earflap hat, standing by his mailbox with a snow shovel and giving me the look I was to see so often in the months to come, a gaze of curious disparagement that said: What a stupid thing to be doing. Like rounding the Isle of Wight by pedalo, or running a marathon in a suit of armour, it was already plain that the epic scale of my undertaking would always be undermined by its inherent foolishness.

  In mid-morning my support crew would pass by with a deranged volley of toots, or without one if my sober and focused son was at the wheel (in fairness, this wasn’t just his introduction to driving on the wrong side of the road: since passing his test the month before, he had yet to drive on the right one). Shortly afterwards I would ingest several pre-packaged supermarket burgers in a bus shelter, and very nearly enjoy doing so now that lunch was just a meal, rather than a death-forestalling imperative fumbled desperately into my chattering maw with numb claws. Many flat and easy kilometres later I would arrive at our overnight stop to find the two of them warming up the sauna or lighting the fire, and on one memorable occasion speeding across the ice on a dogsled.

  My wife had brought out a replacement crank, supplied on request by my friends Matthew and Jim after Harri had given his repair job a very limited guarantee. By a small miracle, when the crank did go one late afternoon I was coasting up to the rural guest house we had arranged to meet at. The proprietor politely took over the replacement process after tolerating my unschooled veranda batterings for as long as he could bear to, then went back in to prepare us a meal of Michelin-grade complexity. Jarkko was his name, and I am happy to rank him as the second most impressive human I have ever met, just behind the Vietnam Special Forces veteran with whom I re-enacted the summer of 1775 in a Kentucky forest. Jarkko spoke fluent English, and used it to articulate his informative and entertaining views on history and literature. He was a wine connoisseur, an omniscient naturalist and a marine engineer who owned the largest socket set I have ever laid eyes on. That said Jarkko also arranged for us to stay at the Howling Wolf Inn.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Support team arrived just as we finished, and in some style.

  Survey route 5223 on Google Street View, as I just did, and you will find yourself gazing down a smooth, winding sylvan corridor, flanked with the Finnish autumn’s rouged and gilded splendour. This is not the 5223 I remember. I arrived at its lonely commencement already a depleted figure, indeed an almost unrecognisable one. Earlier in the afternoon, much earlier, I had
passed a triangular warning sign: the word ‘Kelirikko’ below a giant exclamation mark. For a jolly five minutes I speculated on its meaning. Unexploded Molotovs? Moomin cull? Perhaps people had stopped wondering if they should run about aimlessly, and were now doing it all over the road. A less jolly sixth minute introduced me to what I would later learn to be the seasonal thaw, and its dramatic impact on unmade roads. Wikipedia offers a pithy encapsulation of the related challenge: ‘The only practicable vehicles during the kelirikko are hovercraft, hydrocopters or aircraft such as helicopters.’ So began my one-man, two-wheeled, three-hour tribute to the German retreat from Stalingrad.

  The support crew had passed as I floundered up a hill of half-set cement, two slithers forward, one slide back, stopping to offer words of succour and three Snickers bars. My son phoned a couple of hours later just as I was pushing the MIFA on to 5223.